Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday November 21, 2012 @05:54PM
from the onward-and-upward dept.

sfcrazy writes "The KDE team has released the first beta for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. 'With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality.' QtQuick in Plasma Workspaces has received a lot of work: 'Plasma Quick, KDE's extensions on top of QtQuick allow deeper integration with the system and more powerful apps and Plasma components. Plasma Containments can now be written in QtQuick. Various Plasma widgets have been rewritten in QtQuick, notably the system tray, pager, notifications, lock & logout, weather and weather station, comic strip and calculator plasmoids. Many performance, quality and usability improvements make Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces easier to use.' Here's the Feature Plan for 4.10."

Given the choices of the new DE's I have to say I could see my self actually using these last few KDE's, they have come quite a way since the early 4x days. Course I use XFCE cause I am more interested in my computer actually computing than having floaty windows and bullshit widgets all alpha blended like a hollywood production, but IF my choices were limited to GNOME3, Unity or KDE... I honestly believe KDE is the less bloaty pile of pain in the ass.

...they also seemed to have a rough spot in the past months. For months, there was no stable version available for ubuntu Precise, which is an LTS. Last month, they finally released 3.5.13.1, with support for Precise. I also had trouble accessing their web page and repos for many days in a row. Not exactly the kind of stability I would expect for my main DE.

By the way, KDE 3.5 was my first Linux experience. It was my DE of choice; it worked well and I liked the configurability. But I always found it butt ugly. Looked way old-fashioned and outdated compared to OSs/DEs. Tried a few different themes, but that only made it worse. I still stayed with it for its functionality. But I always found it totally unsexy.

They're repos were very unstable when I tried it (I had it running on Fedora 16). Running KDE 3.5 on a modern comp (FX-8120, SSD, etc) was quite wonderful. I should try to see if any of the kinks have been ironed out (and I might try to build compiz too. KDE 3.5 + Compiz was my Linux Desktop Nirvana).

I still run kde 3.4.2 on many slackware ran machines, patched to 12.2 . I run kde4 on my ubuntu laptop after giving a fair try to unity. KDE 3 is fine if you do not need all the pnp stuff for wireless, sound etc that used to take weeks to set up on a linux laptop. I used to run fvwm on slackware 1.2.3 and back then, I had a hard time moving to kde because of the awful resource consumed. Same old, same old.

Well, even Linus says kde ain't in such a bad state. I always instinctively stayed away from gnome since it first came out and it had your workspace switching interface in a 3d cube and what not. So, fvwm, xfce, kde. On Ubuntu, install Kubuntu-Low-Fat-Settings.

Kde4 still seems like a pig to me but it ain't as bad as most people pretend. You have to know how to read how much resources your programs really use. Below, in the top output, palsma only uses 28 megs RAM for itself really. My laptop is a thinkpad T43 with one Gig RAM and the total of my workload is about 6 Gigs if you look at the first column that says 300m. Do not let this fool you !

This is pretty much how I feel too. I use XFCE + compiz for the perfect blend of speed and desktop customizability. Gotta have a little bling. But the way compiz has been going, it looks like the day might come where it is no longer an option, and I hope that KDE will have their shit together by then. I've checked out KDE several times in the past, but it's just never looked "ready" yet. (to be fair it has been a while)

Still no focus adding an onscreen keyboard with word completion. This needs to be added. KDE is now in the mainstream. Windows 7 onscreen keyboard is great...Linux alternatives, suck.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=265452 [kde.org]

As you probably know, since you're quoting the bug report, the Mallit keyboard from Meego (which has very good word completion) is already available in KDE Plasma Active, and is being ported to KDE desktop.

The onscreen keyboard is a low priority for KDE desktop, because it's a desktop OS, not one intended for tablets. When W7 was released, Microsoft had no real tablet OS, so they've had to shoehorn the two interfaces together. Hence the predictive onscreen keyboard in their primary desktop UI. KDE is a bit more versatile.

It's wonderful that you love Windows 7 so much - perhaps you should stick with it and leave Linux to those of us who enjoy using it? Learning a new tool can be challenging for anybody. You can check back in occasionally to see if it has stopped "sucking".

Actually I've been a Linux/KDE user since 2001. Yes Linux onscreen keyboards do stink. I have tried them. There is no reason why KDE desktop can't have a viable onscreen keyboard. I am pushing for one because I am disabled and cannot physically type, only operate a touchpad.
Don't be so quick to judge : )

It's wonderful that you love Windows 7 so much - perhaps you should stick with it and leave Linux to those of us who enjoy using it?

Come come, OP wasn't being critical of Linux, just noting that Windows has a better onscreen keyboard. For all I know, that may be right. If so it may be something to learn from.

As for KDE being permanently a desktop environment and not for mobile... I actually have more confidence in the KDE project to get the details right than Apple or Google. The QT/C++ foundation is really powerful in that regard, for introducing the necessary new abstractions. Recall that Nokia's prime interest in QT was for mobile. S

One has to wonder why did you add the last sentence there. It has absolutely no relevance to the topic, and running Ubuntu server does not grant you any bragging rights - anyone and their dog can do that these days.

KDE 4.10 gets definitely back into the fun zone. Hunting down bugs is more fun when there are few. The news test environments like Jenkins [kde.org] seem to be helpful, as well as reviewboard [kde.org] and EBN/krazy [englishbre...etwork.org].
Does KDE 4.10 compile with LLVM compiler?

There are two ways you can do it, one is via a javascript plasmoid type hack, and the other is by having a "current_wallpaper" file somewhere, setting it as your wallpaper, then overwriting the file to change it (KDE (should) pick up the change and set the wallpaper accordingly).

Of course, both of these options are absolutely ridiculous. It's understandable how something like this got missed in the switch from dcop to dbus, but it's annoying how long it has sat there (especially as the fix is really simple, and has already been written).

It really bothers me that people that are SO good at math cannot figure that 4.1 and 4.10 are exactly the same thing. Please name the 1 version 4.01 and 10 version 4.10. Trailing zeros have no values and are implied. FTR I work in marketing and I am not that advanced in math...

I've noted this in the past as well. GP suggestion is exactly what I suggested - that start everything from x.01 and go up to wherever, and only introduce (x+1).01 when the new features are thoroughly tested. For instance, in this case, they ought to retroactively rename the first 10 KDEs as 4.01 to 4.09, and continue. Whenever Wayland support is complete in KDE, introduce that as KDE 5.01.

Oh, and get rid of any.00 versions. The first release of any new version should be.01, not.0 or.00.

A marketing example - It really bothers me how people SO good at English cannot figure out that "new and improved" is an oxymoron. If something is new then there is no previous version to improve upon.

The point is the following: 4.10 pounds of meat is equal to 4.1 pounds of meat. Why 4.10 ion versioning numbers are different than 4.1. considering the amount of mathematical knowledge required for proficience in software development, I am genuinely and completely "flabergasted" by the lack of rigor. This comment represent my opinion and by no means is a scientific survey. Still, it smells mediocrity to my nose.

This is because you are not thinking about it in the right way: We do not know the number of versions, subversions, subsubversion there will be. Therefore, we cannot choose a nice base. If we knew there would never be more than 16 of them, Hex would work: 1.0, 1.2,...1.A, 1.B,..., 1.F.

But we can interpret the digits between dots as a single symbol -- which it is, it is the number of releases at that level. Thus, x.y.z makes sense for any integers x, y, and z.

Then call it that - 1.a, 1.b, 1.c and go all the way up to 1.z. Nobody will object. But GP is right - if they say 4.10, it makes it look like it's 4.1. The other way they could have done it is called it 4.91, 4.92... and hopefully, 5 would be ready by then. At that point, call v5 as 5.01, so that they won't run into this issue again.

Maybe because version numbers are text labels rather than numeric values, even though they look similar? What comes to mind when you see version numbers with *two* decimals, like Linux 3.0.5? Does your head start to explode?

4.1 and 4.10 are not the same thing, as the period in a software version is not a decimal point. Do you think US Thanksgiving falls on 0.5 this year (since 11/22 is 0.5)? For that matter, how do you explain version 4.1.1? That's not even number!

If you can comprehend dates that use slashes and not divide them out, or subtract ISO style dates (2012-11-22: US Thanksgiving falls on 1979 this year!), then what is the problem with periods as a separator for versions?

IP addresses and ISBN numbers in books must drive you bug nuts. And I imagine you have problems with entering telephone numbers, since your slavish devotion to "all numbers are math" would cause you to multiply the area code by the exchange minus the subscriber code: (202) 456-1414 goes into your contacts as 95258.

Your method would require knowing how many updates are made before the next major release. What if you committed more than 100 updates? Looks like you should have done X.001 instead. It's far more practical to just let versions of the form X.Y be two distinct numbers, where X refers to major releases and Y refers to updates within X. X and Y are NOT supposed to be part of the same number.

Incidentally, pretty much every math textbook I've seen follows this same pattern. Sections have some form like 1.0, 1.1,

To those thinking that 4.10 and 4.1 are the same, I'm on 4.9.2 (Four period nine period two) now to go back to 4.1 (four period one) would be silly as the beta is 4.10 which is (Four period Ten) I hope that clears things up for some:). on a serious note I'll wait for my distro (PCLinuxOS for those interested, not a *buntu fan personally) to have the stable in before I jump in

Running 4.9.3 on Slackware. I've always run away from KDE. But, I turned off almost all of the desktop effects, spent some time finding a theme I like and tweaking things, add the Infinality font code, and I find myself very happily surprised. It's fast, easy, reliable, etc., etc. And, yeah, tweakable. Loaded openbox expecting to see big reductions in memory use. Didn't happen. I saw marginal changes. Besides, I get a menu when I right click on this KDE desktop. Why would I use openbox that does the same thing and little else?

I'd be happy to use Gnome 3 if I could control what goes in the panel and if that pseudo-dock behaved like a real dock. But, they seem fixated on sticking to One Very Narrow True Path. Too bad.

The truth is that both early versions of KDE 4 and Gnome 3 were releasesd months before they should have been. We all get to play guinea pigs for software that should have stayed in house for more development iterations, if the resources were there. They aren't.

I ran mint 13 kde on a crappy netbook atom 1.3ghz(pentium with hyper-threading), 2gb ram, intel gma500(i compiled and ran intel's newest version), with full effects using xrender and it ran faster than windows 7 especially when watching hulu or youtube videos. Windows 7 with full effects on ran like shit, kde smooth. I also ran mint 13 with xfce clean install on the same netbook and i just don't see the difference between this one and the kde version in performance, both run fast.